Keeper of the Light

turned away from her, embarrassed.

She looked up at him from her seat on his bed.

“Paul,” she said, her dark blue eyes big and sad. “I don’t get it. Don’t you want me?”

He looked down at her, startled. “I…yes. But I didn’t think you…”

She groaned, curling her fingers into the pockets of his jeans. “God, Paul, I’ve been going crazy trying to figure out how to make you fall in love with me.”

“I’ve been in love with you for weeks,” he said. “Here. I can prove it.” He pulled out the top drawer of his desk and handed her a poem, one of many he’d written about her in the past few weeks. It made her cry.

She stood up to kiss him, a far longer, far steamier kiss than the one they’d shared on stage. Then she walked over to his door and turned the lock. He felt his knees start to buckle and wondered how he would get through this. “I’ve never made love before,” he admitted, leaning awkwardly against his desk. He’d had a number of girlfriends in high school, two in particular, who were drawn to his sensitivity and his poems, but he was still very much a virgin.

Annie, however, was not.

She smiled. “So that’s it,” she said, as though that explained everything. “Well, I’ve been doing it since I was fifteen, so you don’t have a thing to worry about.”

Her words shocked him at first. Disappointed him. But then he felt relieved, because as she began kissing him, touching him, it was quickly obvious that she did indeed know what she was doing.

“You are to do absolutely nothing,” she said. She undressed him to his boxer shorts and rolled him onto his stomach. Then she straddled him and began a long, deep massage, her hands soft and cool at first, heating up as she worked them over his skin. She rolled him onto his back and took off her T-shirt and bra. Paul reached up to touch the creamy white skin of her breasts, but she caught his hand and set it back down at his side.

“You may look but you may not touch,” she said. “I told you, you have to just lie here. Tonight is entirely for you.”

She made love to him the way she did everything in her life—generously, putting his pleasure ahead of her own.

In the weeks that followed, he realized that she could give endlessly, but she could not take. When he’d try to touch her during their lovemaking, she’d brush his hand away. “You don’t need to do that,” she’d say, and he soon realized that she meant it, that she’d be overcome with discomfort, thrown completely out of equilibrium, when he tried to turn the tables and give to her, in bed or out.

He bought her flowers once, for no particular reason, and her smile faded when he gave them to her. “These are way too pretty for me,” she said, her cheeks crimson. Later that day, she gave the roses to another girl in the dorm who had admired them.

He bought her a scarf for her birthday, and the next day she took it back, slipping the twelve dollar refund into the pocket of his jeans. “Don’t spend your money on me,” she said, and she would not listen to his protests. Yet her gifts to him kept coming, and he grew increasingly uncomfortable accepting them.

One day he and Annie were eating lunch in the cafeteria when they were joined by a pretty brunette Annie had known in elementary school. “You were the nicest girl at Egan Day School,” she said to Annie. Then she turned to Paul. “She was by far the most popular kid in the entire school. She was one of those girls you wanted to hate because she was so popular that she left no room at all for the competition, but she was so nice you just couldn’t help but like her.”

That night Annie lay next to him in his bed and told him how she had earned her popularity. “I have an enormous allowance,” she said, her voice oddly subdued, almost flat. “I bought the other kids candy and toys. It worked.”

He pulled her closer. “Didn’t you think you were likable just as you were?”

“No. I thought I was an ugly little girl with terrible red hair. My mother fussed with my hair every morning, and she’d say how horrible it was, how bad I looked. I’d end up crying practically every day on my way to school.”

“You’re so beautiful. How could she do that to you?”

“Oh, well.” Annie swept her arm through the air. “I don’t think she meant to hurt me. She just…I guess she has her own problems. Anyhow, I really panicked when I got to high school and there were zillions of new kids to meet. I knew candy and toys weren’t going to work anymore. I had to find some other way to get people to like me.”

“Did you find a way?”

“Yes.”

“Well?”

“I found a way to get the boys to like me, anyhow.”

“Oh, Annie.”

“Don’t hate me.”

He stroked her cheek. “I love you. You don’t have to do that anymore. You’ve got me.”

“I know.” She snuggled close. “Hold me tighter, Paul.”

He did, loving that she would confide in him, and he thought the time was right to ask her the question that had been on his mind since the first time they’d made love.

“Something bothers me, Annie,” he said. “Do you ever come when we’re making love?”

He felt her shrug. “No, but it doesn’t matter. I’m content just to be close to you and see you enjoying yourself.”

He was disappointed. Embarrassed. “I must be doing something wrong.”